nothing in here is true

Tuesday, February 18, 2003

be it comments, email, trackbacks, or simple hit counts after a certain post, effect how you blog? My mind leaps to raymi the minx’s observation that fewer people read when she doesn’t post pics is an example of where I’m going with that.

Interaction is nice in its own vacuum. For the most part the hits and the comments and the email are steady to this blog. In my opinion, the spikes just mean that you were in the right place at the right time, or you were the first to bring up a topic, or you had done something better than normal. Sometimes you can shoot for those spikes to see if you can actually create them. But it’s a game that might lose you just as many regular readers as it gets you.

For the most part I try to ignore all outside influences and just write mostly for myself. I suppose if I wrote 100% for myself I would talk much more about Fantasy Basketball and Baseball, and i’d try to write erotica, but it would be funny erotica, or disturbingly dirty.

many times ive had a young woman want to talk dirty and after a while it makes you wonder what dirty really is. most the times it means sexy. but this is hollywood. sometimes it means dirty. sometimes it means please let me know that my horrendously scary life isnt as ridiculous as im afraid it is, in which cases it does everyone a world of good if you can dig deep in the well and come back with some gnarly ass shit that you would like to do to her, gnarly because it seems possible.

but for blogging, im not at all interested in any outside influences other than what topics not to write about because everyone else is covering it wonderfully.

as for comments, if some anonymous asswipe drops some negative bullshit in your comments, you can react to it if you want, but all you’ll end up doing is attracting people to write dumbass comments to watch you go off on them. And if you address all the nice comments, then you have this sticky sweet makeout session with your readers, which is gross, so fuck that too.

when in doubt, write what is uncomfortable.

2) How much time do you spend looking at your own blog? Not composing it, but after you hit submit.

not enough. lots of times i write during my two government mandated fifteen minute breaks. and rarely can i read what i wrote, or proof read it, or edit it, or even spell check it. if i go back to it later in the day, i wont read it, because if i read it and i dont like what i wrote i’ll be bummed out at work, and my job is way to stressfull to get bummed out over a fucking blog. if i look at it at all, i will read the comments to see if someone wrote something nice. or i will look at site meter to see who’s linking me.

at night i might read a little bit of it, but something usually doesn’t sound right and it distracts me and i stop reading and go and read someone elses stuff. i spend hours and hours reading other blogs on the web. in the old days if you wanted to read all the good writers, you had to buy a dozen newspapers. now you just have to click around the web for a few hours.

3) You can try to pass of Shirky’s analysis as ‘3 seconds after the big bang’, but how do you address the hidden point that although anyone can blog, we have no real way yet of sifting through the mud to find the gold nuggets?

well no damn robot is going to be able to find these nuggets, which means that people will have to and once those people find them they will usually want to report them the way they are on boing boing and metafilter and slash dot.

or more instapundits will pop up.

but one of the best things about the web as it is right now with all these blogs is that if one person discovers something cool, he tells a few friends and it all spreads very naturally depending on its true worth.

if people really find cats singing white stripes songs, they’ll forward it to their friends in email, or talk about it on their blogs.

if you read the instapundit, metafilter, and ten good blogs, you’ll find most of the golden nuggets.

4) Is there a middle ground between personal blogs and larger constructs like kuro5hin? (question asked by lago, but with a slightly different angle).